Dream of light (A comment on volunteering at Villa Carital)

Everyone can’t enter it. You have to be able to enter the special code before opening the door. You step in and the door closes behind you. Then a sudden mysterious alternation happens and you walk into a dream. In the dream people look similar to ordinary humans but their heart is made of light. They are so different that it makes you act differently. They are so kind that it makes you kind. Hope flies around the air of the hopeless dream. Their countdown has started but they still smile, laugh, and love. They don’t belong to the darkness. Their heart is made out of light.
The time tells you to leave. You open the door and step into the darkness….

Ode to the Book

When I close a book
I open life.
I hear
faltering cries
among harbours.
Copper ignots
slide down sand-pits
to Tocopilla.
Night time.
Among the islands
our ocean
throbs with fish,
touches the feet, the thighs,
the chalk ribs
of my country.
The whole of night
clings to its shores, by dawn
it wakes up singing
as if it had excited a guitar.

The ocean's surge is calling.
The wind
calls me
and Rodriguez calls,
and Jose Antonio--
I got a telegram
from the "Mine" Union
and the one I love
(whose name I won't let out)
expects me in Bucalemu.

No book has been able
to wrap me in paper,
to fill me up
with typography,
with heavenly imprints
or was ever able
to bind my eyes,
I come out of books to people orchards
with the hoarse family of my song,
to work the burning metals
or to eat smoked beef
by mountain firesides.
I love adventurous
books,
books of forest or snow,
depth or sky
but hate
the spider book
in which thought
has laid poisonous wires
to trap the juvenile
and circling fly.
Book, let me go.
I won't go clothed
in volumes,
I don't come out
of collected works,
my poems
have not eaten poems--
they devour
exciting happenings,
feed on rough weather,
and dig their food
out of earth and men.
I'm on my way
with dust in my shoes
free of mythology:
send books back to their shelves,
I'm going down into the streets.
I learned about life
from life itself,
love I learned in a single kiss
and could teach no one anything
except that I have lived
with something in common among men,
when fighting with them,
when saying all their say in my song.
Pablo Neruda

Another Iranian Revolution?

(The photo from "The New York Times")

After the Iranian elections in June 2009, meanwhile President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad started his second term with the majority of votes, the opposition candidates, Mehdi Karroubi and Mir Hossein Mousavi challenged him by questioning the validity of the elections. Since then, a series of protests erupted in Iran at irregular intervals which have become known as the “Green Movement”. Immediately following the creation of this movement, the international observers doubted the likelihood of a serious impact of the demonstrations. However, after the recent December 28th demonstrations in which without any previous announcements by their leaders, a vast number of opposition supporters took to the streets of Iran on the holy day of Ashura, various political analysts started to reflect on the possible long term outcomes of the “Green Movement” rather than its persistence.
During the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran, it was highly possible that after the revolutionaries overcome the Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi’s regime, they would create a fundamentalist government. But after several months of demonstrations it is still uncertain what the outcome of the demonstrations will be.